NEW YORK, United States – Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has called for a united continental offensive to end the historical exploitation of Africa’s natural endowments, urging African governments to forge an aggressive alliance that will immediately halt the unrefined export of raw materials and position the continent as a premier global hub for local mineral processing, industrial manufacturing, and beneficiation, diplomatic dispatches confirmed from New York on Tuesday, September 22, 2026.
The call was delivered during the 3rd Africa Minerals Strategy Group High-Level Roundtable on Critical Minerals Development in Africa, convened and chaired by Nigeria on the sidelines of the ongoing 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York under the theme, “From Resources to Wealth: Continental Cooperation for Mineral Value Addition, Data Sovereignty, Innovative Financing and Critical Minerals Security.”
Okay News reports that in a keynote address presented on his behalf by Vice President Kashim Shettima, GCON, alongside the Chairman of the Africa Minerals Strategy Group and Nigeria’s Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dr. Dele Alake, President Tinubu cautioned that the continent cannot claim to possess immense wealth while its populations remain trapped in systemic deprivation amid resource fields that power global technological advances.
“For generations, Africa has furnished the materials of prosperity elsewhere. Our duty is to ensure that the future being fashioned from African minerals has room for African ambition,” President Tinubu stated, warning that competing through lowered royalties, weakened local content regulations, and excessive tax holidays only undermines the continent’s collective bargaining power on the world stage.
The Nigerian leader emphasized that as clean energy transitions, artificial intelligence systems, and advanced defense manufacturing make critical metals—including cobalt, copper, lithium, and rare earth elements—indispensable to global supply networks, African nations must measure their industrial progress by the jobs created, processing plants established, and domestic technological capabilities developed.
Offering Nigeria’s recent solid minerals sector turnaround as an empirical model for continental adaptation, the President revealed that domestic regulatory reforms—such as requiring mandatory local processing as a prerequisite for mining licenses and clustering artisanal diggers into formalized cooperatives—drove mining revenues from ₦6 billion in 2023 to over ₦38 billion in 2024, and between ₦68.1 billion and ₦70 billion in 2025.
The high-level session witnessed the formal adoption of the Continental Integration and Economic Assurance Declaration, an ambitious intergovernmental compact championed by Dr. Alake to establish a harmonized regulatory architecture, shared logistical corridors, and sovereign geological data platforms across participating member countries.
Underscoring the urgency of the pact, Kenya’s Minister of Mining, Blue Economy and Maritime Affairs, Hassan Ali Joho, joined ministerial delegations from Liberia, Chad, and Tanzania in endorsing domestic resource mobilization and standardized licensing regimes that protect state sovereignty while unlocking commercial capital for resource-backed infrastructure corridors.
President Tinubu concluded by charging African heads of delegation to maintain a unified diplomatic posture, asserting that minerals confer no automatic prosperity and that only firm political will, targeted investments, and industrial discipline will translate the continent’s mineral promise into enduring collective wealth.
